Performance evaluation of span power control scheme for fast optical lightpath provisioning in multi-core fiber networks

The activation time of optical lightpaths is adversely affected by the time that is required by automatic power control strategies to account for the newly added signal power. This limitation is particularly true when using multi-core erbium doped amplifiers. In order to overcome this shortcoming and shorten the lightpath activation time required, this paper evaluates the performance of a fiber span power control scheme based on the use of dummy wavelength signals. The introduced scheme suppresses a significant fraction of the average waiting time for lightpath provisioning in the network that does not make use of dummy wavelengths. Further, we observe that the blocking probability of the introduced scheme depends on the number of used dummy wavelengths per fiber span. In addition, we also observe that when the re-instantiating time of dummy wavelength is adequately lower than that of the holding time, the blocking probability of the introduced scheme is not affected.